Last year, the national average score across all subjects and all schools was 53%, which has risen to 61% this year, while NET’s average score has risen from 36% to 52%. This means that NET has narrowed the gap between its performance and the national figure from 17 to nine percentage points over the last year.

Two academies, Abbey Park Primary in Illingworth, Halifax and Frederick Nattrass in Stockton on Tees, produced results above the national average with scores of 62% and 73% respectively.

Within these results, seven out of 10 NET primary academies have improved their combined reading, writing and maths results with improvement in scores ranging from 11 to 44 percentage points over last year. Out of this number, six out of ten have improved by at least 19 percentage points.

Helen Clegg, the Director of Primary Academies for NET, said: “As an initial overall assessment, reading has been the most challenging, which was the case last year, with a substantial increase in the number of marks required to achieve the national expectation. In this respect, NET’s reading gap score narrowed by half from 22 percentage points to 11 when compared to the national average, while the maths gap narrowed by 13.5 points to 8.5, reflecting a five percentage point improvement.

“In terms of the higher standard, six of our ten primary academies improved their combined reading, writing and maths scores; nine improved in reading, nine improved in maths and five improved in writing.”

We will continue our investment in mentoring and support to improve teaching and learning across all our schools and will not be satisfied until they are all achieving results that are well above the national average - Ian Kershaw, NET’s chief executive

Commenting on the results, NET’s chief executive, Ian Kershaw, said: “Taken as a whole, the results reflect a substantial improvement, but there is still a lot of work to be done to continue this upward trend in average scores. However, there are some really encouraging signs within this data mix of individual schools where the improvements are particularly noteworthy.

“We will continue our investment in mentoring and support to improve teaching and learning across all our schools and will not be satisfied until they are all achieving results that are well above the national average.”

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